The SEOTuners Blog

Monthly Archives: March 2016

Putting together a successful local SEO campaign requires a close look at several different factors. Putting them all together will help you formulate a successful strategy.

What to Consider

Your goals. Determine which efforts are bringing you the most value. Traffic reports don’t mean a thing if they’re not connected to your conversions. So track that down, says MOZ. Focus on the right goals.

Your mind-set. Your background, training, and experience shape the way you think. That kind of mind-set is reflected in your site. So make a conscious effort not to limit your approach by what you know. Seek out learning opportunities and learn new things. Consider your competition in the industry. Yours isn’t the only site out there about shoes, furniture or books. You’ve got a ton of competing sites. To make sure you’re ahead of the pack, you need to keep your eye on the big picture. Look at what your competition is doing or check what companies are doing in other industries. You might stumble into a great idea, one that could completely change the way your business works for the better.

Your information. Take care of your NAP. Entrepreneur explains that NAP stands for name, address and phone. This is one of the most important things you should look over in your online listings. The wrong information will doom you and your customers right from the start. And a false business listing could generate negative feedback about your shop or restaurant, one that could detract from the credibility of your business. Always check to see that these three details are accurate and kept up-to-date.

Your customer interaction. There are plenty of ways you could reach out to your market. One of the most long-standing ways is via email. By sending discount offers, free eBooks and wonderful offers through email, you can easily remind customers of your business. For some, this subtle invitation is all that’s needed to compel them to shop for new deals. It’s also one way to ensure your business isn’t ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ Emails help motivate shoppers to drop by your place or to browse through your site regularly.

Your reviews. People love to read up on reviews—whether it’s about a service or product they’re considering—before they spend their hard-earned money. It’s a wise and practical move. You can take advantage of this consumer habit by reaching out to your best customers and asking them to leave a positive, glowing review, note or message on your site. Nothing convinces customers better than peer-generated reviews from people who are looking for the same services/products they are.

Social Media Counts

Lastly, don’t forget to use social. Social platforms like Facebook help your consumers get easy access to you. Mobile users, especially, tend to use these sites to find nearby business and restaurants wherever they happen to be. Your business could benefit from taking advantage of that feature by enlisting in Google and Facebook platforms. That way, the next time someone’s looking for your type of business, your listing and address should pop right up. Not sure how to do this, or need help with anything else on the above list? For SEO services in LA, ask us for help at SeoTuners.

If you’ve ever looked up a certain product on Google – say, a coffee maker or a video game console, or a new mouse – then you may have noticed that a huge portion of the top listings on Google are highlighted Sponsored Ads – specifically, image and info-rich Product Listing Ads (also known as PLAs).

These PLAs are different from your regular AdWords sponsored ads – text-only ads, that is – in that they’re geared to take the person looking for a product immediately onto the product’s page, and off to the point where they get the product sold. Done and done. And more significantly – they’re doing a better job of it than anything else.

Here’s Where They Can Hurt You

The first significant fact is that PLAs take a huge amount of space on Google’s top page for product searches. The second significant fact is that they’ve got pictures in them –those draw in clicks and views more than simple blue-and-grey text. And finally, since they explicitly give people an easy and simple way to nab an item straight off of Google’s search results, most people who are looking for a product with the intent to buy it, will go for the PLAs. So, PLAs are attracting 60 to 70 percent of clicks in searches because:

They’re big;

They feature images;

They provide people with an easy way to immediately buy something.

That leaves you and your organic, non-sponsored search results with the people who are still unsure about what to buy, or people who are simply looking for reviews, feature articles, or an expert opinion on coffee machines, computer mice, or whatever other product they’re searching for.

Why Did Google Do This?

From Google’s point-of-view, product-listing ads are amazing. Firstly, they work. Secondly, they work better than Amazon. And thirdly, they get us to change up the way we pay for clicks – potentially even leading us to paying more to get the right ads going.

Google’s competition with Amazon is an important point to highlight. As the Business Insider points out, Google’s market share for retail marketer’s paid-search campaigns increased by roughly a percentage point within a single quarter, while Google’s former CEO Larry Page himself said shortly after PLAs were unveiled, that “we’ve seen tremendous uptake from merchants and from users.”

As research firm RKG announced, PLAs drove 28 percent of Google’s non-brand paid search clicks in the final quarter of 2012. And things have been growing since.

What Does That Mean For You?

While it’s nice to know how PLAs impact organic search optimization for product searches, this information does have a silver lining – with it, you can strategically allocate your resources and make a lot more out of your marketing buck.

The key is to know at what stages of shopping you should target a customer. If you’re a product or service provider, your best bet is to look for affordable SEO services in Los Angeles and Ventura– like those provided by SeoTuners – in order to promote your company and business’ name as a premier provider of product information and expertise. And when it comes to getting your product sold, transferring most of your PPC AdWords budget into Google’s PLAs is a wise decision.

Who doesn’t want higher rankings, better organic traffic, and leads? If you want success with them all, you’ll need to look into three things: on-page, off-page and technical factors. This blog post will focus on the first one.

On-Page Optimization

Kissmetrics says on-page optimization is basically what happens when you optimize your website code, and content as well as site structure, ensuring that the meta tags along with other on-page elements are search-engine friendly. Here’s a checklist of elements you should check out:

Keyword: Choose the keyword you want to be known for. What is your unique selling proposition? Determine what your business is about.

Page Title: Your title can influence readers to click or not so come up with a title that grabs your market’s interest. Make sure you’ve got your keyword in there, preferably close to the title tag as much as possible, adds MOZ.

Headline: It usually helps to have your H1 tag and your headline match. While you don’t have to use the same keyword—most people use the H1 tag for keyword placement purposes—it’s better if you use associative keywords for your headline so readers know they’re still on the same topic or idea.

Body Text: Keyword insertions should be seamless. This goes for your primary and secondary keywords. Having relevant and useful content makes a huge difference too, so make sure yours fit the bill. Be on the lookout for keyword placements that seem off or too promotional. This could derail your site and page rankings. So will duplicate content, so use services like Copyscape as much as you can.

Improve search engine relevancy by picking out a URL that’s got your main keyword included within.

The title, filename, as well as text and alt attribute of the image are all handy for keyword placement.

Internal and External links. Internal links should always provide meaningful content to users. However, external links are more controversial. Some think it’s a bad idea to provide outgoing links. The goal, after all, is to make people stay on your site longer. The longer they do, the more chances you have of converting them into shoppers. However, in the interests of providing information to your shoppers, providing links to external quality sites can boost rather than derail your ranking in the end.

Meta description. This usually shows up in search results so it’s one of the first things your potential audience will see. If they like it, then they’ll pay your site a visit. So take it as a chance to make a good first impression on a potential reader.

Social sharing buttons. Improve your chances of getting inbound links by adding social sharing buttons so that visitors can share your content.

Responsive code. With the growth of mobile usage, having a responsive web design should be on top of your list. That way, your users can easily browse through your pages, regardless if they’re doing it via their phones or tablets. By providing them with great user experience, you’ve got a solid chance at higher conversions.

Bottom Line

Overall, you should think about giving your pages a serious SEO audit. Here at SeoTuners, we offer affordable SEO services to help you make the changes you need.

When it comes to marketing, having an online presence is simple, right? Set up a website, perhaps a Facebook page and a Twitter profile, and you're set, right? You can, but if you want to drive the most amount of traffic to your site, you're going to need to optimize it for SEO.

If you don't have the expertise to do it yourself, that's when you bring the professionals in. Hiring an SEO services team in Los Angeles and Ventura such as SeoTuners is money well spent, and here's why.

You'll get a Better Result than Attempting it Yourself

It's true that you can learn about SEO online, and can do some of the alterations to your site yourself, but sometimes it's better to get the professionals in. Domain Hosting Place points out that they have a much deeper knowledge of the subject, and thus can overhaul your site much more effectively. Plus, hiring a team in means you save the time and effort of trying to implement it all yourself.

It's Cost Effective

As marketing campaigns go, a website with high SEO isn't glamorous, but it's the backbone of your entire online presence. SEO often works out cheaper than email marketing campaigns and social media campaigns, although they both have their place in marketing your business. If you're a new business, ensuring you have good SEO should come before anything else.

Your Business Needs a Healthy Content Profile

You may feel that your website is sufficiently professional, but even if it was perfect six months ago, it may be losing views now. Forbes explains that search engines, such as Google, often change the way they look at websites. Trends change quickly online, and if you don't keep up you can be left behind.

Gives your Business Credibility

If your website isn't seen on the first page of search results, in the world of the internet it just isn't relevant. Moz points out that it's not enough to write great content and post it online; your content has to be strong enough to share, thus spreading its presence online through re-posting and linking.

Gives you the Best Insight into your Customers

Part of SEO is researching keywords, and what best brings customers to your website. What's great about this is that it tells you exactly what your customers are looking for, so you can provide them exactly what they need. An SEO team can optimise your keywords too, so you can bring in the customers you want to be marketing towards.

The Competition's Doing it

If nothing else convinces you, it's worth remembering that your competitors are using SEO services, and bringing in more customers while you wait. You don't want to lose out on potential customers just because your SEO wasn't up to par, so bringing in a team will pay for itself in the long run.

SEO is an ever changing beast, and keeping up with it can be a full time job in itself. Hiring in SEO services can mean you're on top of your game online, with very little effort on your part.